


many years and many wars

by buckstiel



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: First Kiss, Homecoming, M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-17
Updated: 2015-12-17
Packaged: 2018-05-07 05:01:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5444237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckstiel/pseuds/buckstiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>When are we going to see each other, she asks</i><br/><i>After a year and a war, I say</i><br/><i>When is the war going to end, she asks</i><br/><i>When we see each other, I say.</i><br/>-Mahmoud Darwish</p>
            </blockquote>





	many years and many wars

**Author's Note:**

> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Bucky asks: “Where’s the first place we would have gone if we had seen the end of the war?” His sleeves are pushed up to his elbows and the ends are pinched in the metal slats of the left. 

Steve doesn’t understand the question, but saying that isn’t something Bucky needs to hear. Those words would spill forth and hit the ground with a sick plop, a slurry from a thick dark sludge that had smeared itself across the empty decades. 

Steve says instead, “We would have gone home, Buck.” Like it should have been obvious. 

It isn’t.

Bucky asks, “How?” 

But he means something else as his voice cracks and as the blacks of his eyes carve out a further hollow, tug at the bottom of Steve’s shirt and implore, “What about after that? What about now?”

There isn’t an answer to that. 

Steve could tell him about the alternate history he’s written in his head, the first few pages messily scribbled on the insides of his eyelids when sleep wouldn’t come the days after he fell from the train. The next chapters outlined in the red half-moons left in his palm lying low in Bruce and Fury’s cabin after the thaw. How so many pages were burned the second Bucky turned around without his mask at Capitol South and the ashes were left to simmer in the pit of his stomach. 

The scenes balance on a branch jutting forth from the timeline he knows, stuck to the tavern with the golden haze and target on its roof with the back room that muted the raucous, off-key singing Dugan was leading, the quiet omen that Steve would swear to stomp on before it had the chance to shift to something solid, something real. _The best of friends must part, must part._

No. Not that night. Peggy strode into the back room, smirked at the two of them and left to drag Colonel Phillips into the chorus that was now two tables wide--but in this history, Steve hadn’t asked Bucky to follow him into the jaws that would snap shut around his left arm. In this history, the thought came to Steve then, watching Peggy nurse a whiskey sour and chat with Dernier in French he didn’t know she spoke, and he flicked it away. 

Instead he had said, “They’re sending you home, aren’t they?”

“I have options, but they’re saying that’s the best one. Of course…” The old easy grin slid onto his face, though with a couple shudders and skids. “They’d be willing to change their minds for _Captain America_... if you needed…”

He placed a hand on Bucky’s wrist, curved protectively around his fourth drink, and slowly his grip on the glass eased. Fingerprints were pressed into the glass, and Bucky took a shallow but stuttering breath and let the grin fall. 

_Fuck what Captain America needs._

At the back corner of the room laid a door that led to the alley, dank and wet and littered with splintered wood and broken brick and glass from nearby buildings that hadn’t been so lucky. In this history, Steve held on to Bucky’s wrist and took him out to the quiet and the dark where the war seemed an eon away and they could have been back in Brooklyn. 

In this history, Steve leaned against the wall of the tavern and pulled Bucky to him, hands at the back of his head, and kissed him like he knew what the fuck he was doing, feeding all the intention in his heavy-beating heart into his clumsy lips, into the pads of his fingers that crawled down to Bucky’s collarbone, to around the back of his own neck where his uniform pulled into a hot line as Bucky tugged him forward by the collar. 

He said, “I need you safe, Buck.”

And Bucky said, “That’s my line, that’s my line,” muffled in the crease where their lips met, clicked into place like it was the only damn thing that was going to make sense when the whistle of bombs could still be heard low in the distance. 

He took Bucky’s bottom lip between his, kissed it slowly until the jagged beat under his ribcage and disheveled uniform steadied. He pulled back, traced the line of his eyelashes across the sharp cheekbones, the healing wounds--in this history, Steve had a sense, a wispy barely-there idea of what was at stake should Bucky stay, and he laced his right hand into Bucky’s left, the too-hot skin there. 

He said, “Please go home,” kissed him on the tip of his nose. “I’ll meet you there.”

In the now, Bucky taps the fingers of his left hand on the counter, and the clanks swallow up the silence in the room, draw the walls in close and suffocating. His lips tense into a thin line, and Steve can’t help but stare. Every time Bucky’s come back to him--with whiskey on his breath at the tavern or a metal fist hovering high above his broken nose or now, every day that he wakes up and finds him still here and breathing like he’s permanent and staying--that’s when Steve thinks about kissing him. 

In his alternate history, he would have followed instinct the first time. The simmering, it’s started to burn, crackling up his breastbone until it pulses, alive, around his lungs, and he wants the heat of Bucky’s mouth on his. He wants their fingers tangled in each other’s hair and their chests flush like they’ve spent too long apart to be just two people any longer. He wants their ribs braided together. 

If there is any way to express the joy of finding Bucky at the counter every morning, half asleep and holding a mug of black coffee to his nose, it would be that. The words themselves, Steve can’t say them. The air dilutes. Direct transfer, one tongue to another. 

And Bucky says again, “How do we go home?” 

Home is not only a place. 

Steve says, “We make one, I guess.” 

In his alternate history, Steve didn’t crash the Valkyrie in the Arctic. The Red Skull and his henchmen stood trial, and they didn’t follow the news. Bucky was waiting for him at their old apartment, a few tools stashed in the corner--the draft was gone, the couple holes in the ceiling patched. The kitchen table was littered with brochures for local art schools and physics programs--the GI Bill, Bucky explained, even though he had written to Steve about it, but the enthusiasm that brightened the glint at the corners of his eyes was infectious, a reminder that this, this is home.

Bucky grinned at him, and it was more real than the one he had forced months earlier at the tavern. The time back in the city, across the ocean from gunshots and snowy gorges, had done him so much good. Bucky kissed him, and it was slower and sweeter than what they had gripped at in the alley; Steve half-thought he had forgotten, that they weren’t going to talk about it, chalk it up to whatever it was the war was doing to them day by day. 

When he kissed him back, he realized with a happy swoop deep in his stomach, again, that this was home, and that Bucky’s hand on the back of his neck and tongue against his teeth--that was a constant across the divide of home and the dark of a burned-away Europe. 

Home is also a time.

The next morning, Sam doesn’t meet Steve for their daily run. He lets Steve into his apartment unit in Stark Tower and the door clicks behind him with hardly a sound. Fingers tremble as they fiddle with the label at the end of his tea bag.

Sam says, “I’ve had a rough morning.”

Sam is from New York. His childhood row house is close enough to walk to but far enough for it not to be the best use of your time, and the set-up Tony gave him and the rest of the group after the ceasefire is nicer than anything he ever dreamed of. 

He still hasn’t sold his home in Washington. 

Steve says, “You don’t have to stay here, you know.”

And Sam nods. He knows. He misses the DC skyline, how low it sat against the Potomac, how much sky wrapped around the tip of the Washington Monument. How the buildings never reached up high enough to bend over on themselves and harden iron fingers around his lungs. He told Steve all of this months ago, and Steve wonders if he remembers all of it. It was the first time he saw Sam drunk; it was the only time he saw Sam cry.

There’s a moment, a pause before Sam brings his tea to his lips with both hands, when Steve considers that he shouldn’t have been the one to check on him. He’s seen the pictures, more than just the one Sam keeps in his wallet. He looks like Riley. 

Over the rim of his mug, Sam keeps looking over at him. Staring just long enough for Steve to feel the weight of it, and turning back to the banana on the counter, the newspaper from the day before. 

Sam says, “Rain check. We can run tomorrow.” 

The night Steve found him teary-eyed holding an empty bottle of wine still cold from the fridge, Sam said without preamble, “I loved him. After our tours we were going to stay a week at his aunt’s lake house. But he never came home, so I couldn’t either. Not for real.”

When he finds Bucky later in their own unit, Steve falls onto the sofa next to him. The television is turned reruns of a recent tennis tournament on mute, and a warm, half-empty beer sweats a ring onto the table beneath it. Steve watches the ball get lobbed back and forth in silence, hardly notices the slight chill on his hand until it’s smothered in it, until it seeps between his fingers--he looks down and his skin is woven with metal. Bucky squeezes, Steve runs his thumb along the reflections, and the program cuts to commercial. The Italian ends up winning, says the ticker tape along the bottom. 

Bucky says, “This is a miracle.”

Steve asks, “What do you mean?” But he knows.

Bucky leans into Steve’s shoulder, mumbling, “Tell me where we are. Tell me what year it is.”

He rests his cheek on Bucky’s head, and his hair smells like lavender. “We’re in Manhattan. It’s 2016.”

And Bucky sighs, the hot air cutting through Steve’s shirt and humming against his chest, and he can feel the shift of Bucky’s face as the grin twitches there: “See, a fucking miracle.”

Home is also a person.


End file.
